Miami Herald Owner in Danger of Bankruptcy

Layoffs, partnerships, and the Net conspire to kill South Florida's dailies.

The loss of news is almost imperceptible; there's really no way to know what stories we might be missing when there's no one there to report it. The Shrinking Three have handed down nearly 1,000 buyouts and layoffs during the past couple of years, according to my estimate. About 350 of those workers were lost from the newsrooms. I added up those numbers from layoffs I've reported on my blog, The Daily Pulp, because complete documentation of the slaughter can be found nowhere else.

The newspapers are not only dramatically downsizing, but also slowly morphing into one another. All three struck a deal to share stories on their Internet sites, meaning that a reporter for one at any given time is essentially representing all three papers.

The Sentinel and Herald are now distributing each other's newspapers in areas once hotly contested. And just last week, it was announced that the Sentinel will now print and distribute the Post, a move that will cost 300 workers their jobs. These are the same two newspapers, you might remember, that were recently in a full-on, bitter turf war.

For newspapers it feels like Armageddon. But what does it mean for you? Start with smaller papers, less information, and more rushed, half-baked articles. Throw in less coverage of your towns and counties. Tallahassee bureaus have been halved, reporters are covering two or three cities at a time, and in-depth pieces have become a rarer commodity while often-meaningless briefs are all the rage.

The Sentinel, which has never been considered a top newspaper in terms of journalistic quality, produces a fraction of the editorial content it did a couple of years ago. Its front page now features only one story. Among the dozens of journalists who have been led out the door are Tim Collie, an experienced long-form writer; and Joe Demma, the investigative editor.

The Post has seen the most cuts to its newsroom staff. Entire sections have been sheared. A shocking number — upward of 50 — of its veteran editors and reporters took buyouts, including political editor Brian Crowley, Washington bureau chief Larry Lipman, assistant metro editor Douglas Kalajian, longtime cartoonist Don Wright, and a slew of columnists. It has gotten so bad that the once proud and staid newspaper has hired a media consulting company, which specializes in TV news no less, to invade the newsroom. As publisher Doug Franklin put it in an October 10 memo to staff, Frank N. Magid Associates will be working in the newsroom for six months to "help shape our future."

Of the lot, the Herald has probably held up best, for it continues to put out quality investigative work. But it too is seeing the amount of news it produces dwindle as it has gotten rid of about 150 newsroom employees, including storied veterans such as Martin Merzer and Phil Long.

Last week, Herald executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal likened what's happening in the newspaper industry to being hit by a hurricane. But he says he doesn't believe there will be any more job losses at his paper.

"I just don't see that happening," says Gyllenhaal, who was a reporter for the newspaper back in its early-Eighties heyday. "It's been a difficult period, but everybody in the newsroom knows what we need to do. Whether it's a literal hurricane or a figurative one, which is what we're going through in a way, this is a newsroom that is taking it on and handling it."

Perhaps that is true, but just barely, say some of those left behind to keep the website hopping and the dwindling print edition filled with copy.

"We're doing more with less, and there's a lot of chaos in the process," one Herald reporter says. "The constant crush to put news up 24 hours on the web creates huge holes in our reporting. We just can't seem to move fast enough to get the newsroom reorganized with all the people leaving.

"The people still there are getting burned out, and things are starting to fray. It's hard to motivate people when their futures are uncertain, they're not getting raises, and their pay was never much to begin with. Anybody who sits there and says we're as good a product as we were a year ago, I think they're lying."

Gyllenhaal doesn't go so far as to say the newspaper as a whole is better after the cuts, but he does say some aspects of it have improved.

"The heart of what this newspaper does is very much in place," he says when asked to compare the current newsroom to that of the Eighties. "What is not in place is state coverage. We don't have a bureau in Naples and Palm Beach County. We don't have the foreign bureaus, or what we do have has changed. A lot of things have been rearranged. The newspaper, in terms of what we are trying to do now, is equal and, in some ways, better, than it has ever been. In the Eighties, we weren't producing a constantly evolving online edition."

Here he brings up what has been both the bane and hope of the modern newspaper: the Internet. It has decimated the revenue power of the print edition, which Gyllenhaal says remains the industry's "mother ship." But it is also the potential source for untold future profits. The problem is that advertising profits from the web aren't large enough to offset those lost in print, and the day when they do appears to be years away.